Apart from the fact that Alec Guinness played an Arab prince living in the desert in Lawrence of Arabia (1962) fifteen years before he played a Jedi Knight living in the desert in Star Wars (1977), we don’t normally tend to associate T.E. Lawrence with outer space. After all, Lawrence, who famously led the Arab revolt against the Turks during World War I, died in 1935, two decades before the launch of the first artificial satellite in 1957. But a new video about the Hubble telescope and the previously-unknown galaxies discovered by it brought a passage from one of Lawrence’s memoirs to mind.

There are two kinds of films that Roland Emmerich specializes in: the city-smashing disaster epic, as seen in Independence Day (1996), Godzilla (1998), The Day after Tomorrow (2004) and 2012 (2009); and smaller, nuttier quasi-historical films like The Patriot (2000), 10,000 BC (2008) and Anonymous (2011).

Thankfully, the series does seem to have at least one serious biographer on its side, said person being Michael Korda, author of the 2010 book Hero: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia. So maybe that will help rein in some of Emmerich’s crazier impulses.

Deadline reports that James Franco is “circling” a role in Werner Herzog’s long-in-development Gertrude Bell biopic Queen of the Desert. The role — which was once going to be played by Jude Law — is that of Henry Cadogan, a British diplomat who met Bell when she visited Persia, or modern-day Iran, in the 1890s. Bell herself will be played by Naomi Watts.

This bit of news reminds me that I never got around to blogging the last bit of casting news around this film, when it was announced last summer that Twilight star Robert Pattinson is attached to play T.E. Lawrence, a.k.a. “Lawrence of Arabia”. I found that news kind of amusing because Pattinson has already co-starred with another actor who once played Lawrence.